The Complaint: Sexless Novels

Here in cold February, is anyone keeping warm the old-fashioned way?

One of the stranger acts of literary time travel involves rereading Updike, Roth, and Mailer, the triumvirate that David Foster Wallace aptly named the "Great Male Narcissists" on the subject of sex. Holy Christ! Those cats were freaks!

It's not that those fellas wrote about sex particularly well. In fact, many of their passages have aged badly. One can almost feel the itchy unkindness of synthetic fibers against the skin.1 But they did it more often, more graphically, more honestly, and altogether differently from most contemporary writers. It shocks in its candor, in its generalized, post-Pill, irresponsible wackness. Them freaks weren't afraid to get their hands dirty.2

Today, many writers have largely abandoned sex as an area of concern. There are exceptions. Predictably, the French are still capable of producing an enfant terrible, though in the case of Michel Houellebecq, he is no longer particularly enfant nor terrible. The best writing about sex I've read recently comes from England, where Geoff Dyer seems to have a right and healthy attitude about the way these things can work — a little cocaine, some free booze, a chance encounter over a few days in Venice — voilà ... healthy, happy orgasms for all!

And happy readers, too. Because if you're gonna commit all of yourself to reading a book, a writer has gotta give all in return. He's gotta use his hips. Maybe put a little back into it. Jonathan Safran Foer is a lovely cat and all, but Jesus, does that guy ever break a sweat? Brooklyn is lovely, too. But does anyone in his borough remember how to get down? Or anyone else?

The contemporary American lustscape is populated by the sexually unlucky, unhappy, and/or uninterested.3 In The Financial Lives of the Poets, Jess Walter's narrator thinks his wife is "cute" and he longs for a little "smack-smack." Gary Shteyngart writes hilariously about sex, but far more often, its absence. His characters keep close watch on their "fuckability" numbers via their smartphones but fall asleep while going down on one another.4 Meanwhile, Sam Lipsyte's best love scenes involve dudes left to their own devices. The importance of frequent masturbation, it seems, is one thing the old narcissists got right.

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Writing about sex is hard. Some writers claim the best way to do it is by not doing it at all. Focus on the furniture and leave the bodies out of it. But I think that desire is easy and bodies are what's difficult. We need more bodies in our fiction. We need bodies on bodies in all the wack configurations that consenting adults will allow. Fucking matters. And when we ignore it or pretend it was something that can only be elided, or joked about, the joke is on us. Let's stop kidding ourselves. Besides, it's only sex. Which is to say, it's only the most important thing in the world, and nothing to get hung about.51 Here's one from Updike: "He had wanted to cry out, sitting up as if jolted by electricity as the spurts, the deep throbs rooted in his ass-hole, continued, but he didn't know what name to call her... . 'Call me Sukie,' she said, having read his mind. 'I sucked your cock.' 'You sure did. Thanks. Wow.' "

2 From Roth's Sabbath's Theater: " 'Yes, you have my permission, you dirty man, yes,' she said, 'you can have her, I give her to you, you can have her tight young pussy, you dirty, filthy man ... ' "

3 "It wasn't that the kiss was bad, but it was just a note of punctuation in our long conversation." —Nicole Krauss, Great House

4 "I was too drunk and scared to develop an erection. But I didn't want intercourse anyway... . I licked and licked, breathing in the slight odor of something authentic and human, and eventually must have fallen asleep with my face between her legs." —From Super Sad True Love Story

5 "Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin. It's the triumphant twang of a bed-spring." —S. J. Perelman